Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Ethical Man is on the case!

Ethical Man is a guy over at the BBC who travels around and investigates all sorts of ethical stuff, it seems. He finds interesting scenarios that connect in one way or another with larger, global environmental issues, and comments about the big questions of our relationship with Mother Earth.



You can read his blog here, which makes for some interesting reading, although most of it revolves around greenhouse gasses and animal issues are not really highlighted. However, what caught my attention was his visit to a Las Vegas (!) pig-farmer a little while ago.

The video can be watched here and I do recommend it, if only for the nice surprise at the end. It doesn't really deal with the treatment of pigs at this guy's farm (which seems very crowded ...), but rather shows an interesting way of disposing of left-over food. Indeed, the farmer is described as a "food recycler" - meaning that he collects many tons of left-over food from the casinos, hotels and restaurants of Las Vegas every day, and re-uses it by feeding it to his pigs. Certainly, the pigs get a mixed stew of all sorts of food, which is all fine and good for the pigs, I guess. And the food isn't thrown away, which is always a positive thing. But is this a sustainable solution to the problem of the over-production of food? I guess Ethical Man seems to think so. But it's really just a cover-up, something that cleans up the environmental image but does nothing to change the system, as the left-over food goes directly into making more food, which will only become more left-overs (and subsequently fed to other pigs?) ... so people can keep on overindulging and pigs can keep on getting mass slaughtered.



A vicious cycle of over-consuming, indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment